


Three Golden Fish

by gloss



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Macondo, pre-canon backstory, smol orphan spy, space latinxs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-10
Updated: 2017-01-10
Packaged: 2018-09-16 15:45:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9278525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gloss/pseuds/gloss
Summary: Where Cassian came from, what he did to resist, how he got to the rebellion.(Film canon only.)





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [orchis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/orchis/gifts).



> This story draws heavily on Orchis's vision of what space!Latin America might look like: a system called Macondo, made up of several different planets and moons, sharing a lingua franca and some broad cultural aspects. Any badness or inconsistency is my fault; all the good stuff is probably hers. <3
> 
> Thanks also to GGFM for further riffing and editing.
> 
> Some mention, non-exploitative and not for titillation, is made of teenagers being sexual with each other.

Cassian is two years old when his mother moves them to the capital city. Beyond a few intense sensory impressions - the stripe of afternoon light cast on the ceiling when he was supposed to be napping, the sound of the fish-mongers shouting prices, the taste of nectar over ice - he doesn't remember the village where he was born.

He's six when the Republic falls. His mother cries; there are firework tearing the sky, then alarms everywhere and the thud of boots.

He is eight when the Imperials take his mother for good. 

He rounds the corner of their apartment block and draws up short. There are two troopers and a droid outside the entrance checking identichips and scanning faces. The droid is a repurposed municipal model. The old city-government seal on its torso has been removed -- there are still rivet holes, halo'ed by rust -- and an Imperial decal affixed in its place.

Cassian doubles back and hides in the market's public washrooms until well after dark. Over the hours he crouches in the last half-stall, sentients come and go, relieving themselves, doing intricate deals, crying, kissing, everything in between. He has a small datapad for practicing arithmetic and sigils on; that keeps him company until dark. After that, he pulls his knees to his chest, loops his arms around his legs, and tries to rest. When he hears the curfew alarm sound and the gates to the market thud shut, he emerges, scales the wall, and heads home. Only the droid remains on guard. 

At the side of the building, Cassian climbs hand over hand up the waste-disposal pipe, then shimmies through the broken ventilation panel on the top story. He's been running errands, delivering messages, for his mother, criss-crossing the city and outlying islands, for several months now. He knows how to sneak in to _a lot_ of buildings. From there, he pads down the hallways and emergency exits until he reaches the fourth floor and his apartment.

He has lived here as long as he can remember, though he was born far to the west of here. But this is -- _was_ home: two rooms plus the combination cooker and fresher. When he finished the school year, his mother had promised, they'd try to find somewhere bigger so they didn't have to share the bedroom any more.

The door is gone, pulled out of the wall. Cassian steps through the hole, and immediately slips in something greasy and slick all over the floor. The lights are blinking on and off; he hears something rustling in the second room, then the hydraulic inhale of a blaster.

He moves out from the light into the shadow along the wall. The contents of their foodkeeper are spilled out all over the floor; the cooker is overturned. There are burn marks on the walls and the odor of old damp.

"Claimed!" the person in the next room yells. The blaster glints as it's waved over their head. "I got here first, it's mine! Bucketheads didn't leave much but it's mine!"

Cassian edges along the wall and strains to see.

"Get along," the person shrieks. "Mine!"

He thinks it's sad old Nawl from the bottom floor. It doesn't actually matter who it is. This isn't Cassian's home any longer. It's just broken junk and overturned garbage. He has no claim.

"Keep it! It's yours!" he yells backs when he reaches the ragged edge of the doorway.

*

He's heading out of the market one morning, three redfire fruit in his pockets. He stole them from two different stalls, which usually cuts down the odds of getting caught.

His stomach yaws empty, almost _sharp_ , like shrapnel in his gut.

When a rough voice tells him to stop and hauls him back by the collar, he knows that's it, time to cut and run. He starts to shrugs out of the jacket and tries to take off, but then the person holding him yanks him back by the wrist and hisses his name.

He hasn't heard his name since he left for school the morning his mother disappeared. Cassian freezes. 

"Reema's Cassian," the person says, still under their breath, but with more certainty.

Stupidly, Cassian nods. 

They drag him backwards through the narrow space between two stalls. When he hits the stone wall, he makes himself look up. 

A squat person looks him over with narrowed eyes, sucking their lower lip. They're wreathed in bright shawls, the kind worn in the mountains to the south.

"Where is she?"

"I don't know," Cassian says. "I don't think she's coming back."

They nod and rub their chin. "What about the stevedores, that pair of them? They still around?"

He shrugs. 

They grin at him then and ruffle his hair with a big, callused palm. "You don't trust me, that's good."

"I don't know you."

"All the more reason!" They push the shawl back from their face and shake out their hair. "But I need you to do me a favor."

"I don't..."

Their hand closes around the knob of Cassian's shoulder. He imagines he can feel the heat of that touch stealing through his body, like a fever coming over you. "Listen very carefully. Three white fish get caught. The fisher girl says to them --"

Cassian tips back his head, frowning. It's a song he knows very well, but this person's getting it all wrong. "Three _golden_ fish! Named steadfast, kindness, and hard-study. And --"

His mother sang it all the time; she knew lots of old songs from all over the system. You have to try to be all three fish, baby, she'd say, you have to stay loyal, kind, and smart. Can you do that?

They shake him by the shoulder, so roughly his teeth clack together. "Listen. Three _white_ fish. Fisher girl says where o where do you swim, first one says 'Coruscant'. Second one, 'Alderaan'. Third one, 'Selonia'. In that order. Got it?"

Cassian wants to protest, but he nods instead. It's wrong but who is he to say anything?

"Say it back to me."

"Three white fish. Coruscant, Alderaan, Selonia."

"Good boy." Their touch gentles, cups the side of his neck. "You go sing that to the stevedores, they'll make sure to feed you, all right?"

"What if they're not there?"

"Then you'll go hungry, won't you? And the Emperor will win."

Cassian pulls his jacket back on and slides down the aisle back into the throng of the market. He hums the song to himself as he cuts across the memorial garden and shimmies down a maintenance shaft into the transit tunnels.

He comes out at the harbor authority and hangs around the crowd for a while, eating one of his redfire fruit while watching a pirate juggle fire. He tries to get into a mermaid exhibit, but the ticket seller just laughs at him. "Go home, baby, get back on the teat."

At last, he finds one of the stevedores, the tall half-Rodian one, taking a piss against the side of the harbor police station. He doesn't recognize Cassian at first and shoves past him, telling him to fuck off. Calls him a rat and a pinch-dip, all in Basic. 

"I'm not!" Cassian's no thief. As tall as this man is, Cassian needs him to know that. (Food is different; no one should be hungry.) He adds, in careful Basic, "I have a song --"

The man stops short and looks back. Cassian draws himself up to his full height, maybe a little more, and meets his stony gaze.

In Macondian, and quietly, the stevedore asks, "Reema's boy?"

Cassian means to say 'yes', but he can't breathe. The sound of his mother's name took all the air. He just nods wildly.

The man hefts Cassian by his neck, lets him dangle. "Prove it."

As Cassian sings the song, the man's expression relaxes. It happens in stages, Cassian realizes, first a loosening around his mouth, then a widening of his eyes, finally meeting in the middle. 

Trust, Cassian learns then, arrives slowly, haltingly. Sometimes it never comes all the way.

The stevedore treats him to the buffet in the harbor cafeteria and even sends him back to the market with two more messages and several credit chips in his pocket.

*

He spends the next two seasons tending to the remnants of his mother's network. He doesn't entirely understand what they do, what they care about, but the fact that he's Reema's son seems to mean something. They all hate the empire, which is more than enough for him. 

From one of them, or someone they know, he can usually find a place to sleep or a warm jacket when he outgrows the current one. In exchange, he delivers messages -- verbal, usually, but sometimes encrypted holos and stone-heavy storage media -- more quickly than anyone else. He notices things, too, patterns in security patrols, unusual faces disembarking at the airfield. Some of the contacts are far more interested in what he's seen than what he's carrying.

There are more and more arrivals, imperial hangers-on and regular immigrants here for work in the new industries springing up. Speaking Macondian rather than Basic grows more dangerous by the ten-night. If a trooper catches you, you're lucky to escape with a beating; if anyone from the security bureau overhears, you won't be seen again for a good long while.

Cassian comes to know the city better and better. He uses the old transit tunnels, criss-crossed with the sewers, and even sometimes the narrow tubes that carry comms cables and optic equipment, which he is still small enough to wriggle through. Even after three growth spurts, agonizing for as long as they last, he remains smaller than kids a few seasons his junior.

There is a second system of tunnels, amateur ones dug between cantinas and housing blocks, the port and the various markets. He helps dig a few, because he's fearless in the dark and quick. Tireless. The amateur network spreads out from the few radical pockets left. Wherever there are Macondians, Cassian has realized, there are sure to be at least a few radicals. 

By the time he's nine, he employs three assistants, all kids, two girls and a nonbinary Seechin. They know the tubes and sewers almost as well as he does. He met the Seechin down in one of the newer tunnels; they'd been in semi-hibernation, shivering and talking nonsense. Cassian had to give them his jumper and find a bowl of stew.

He knows better, now, what the Macondians and other radicals are doing. They're organizing against the Imperials. He delivers a message about fish spawning under the Rondel Bridge, returns to the sender with a date and time, and then, exactly that day a week later, seven troopers are blown out of the sentry station on the span. He brings a holo to an exporter at the back of the salvage market and trades it for what seems like a sleeve of dried herbs. The woman he brings it back to is a cook at one of the automated cafeterias by the government buildings. A terrible case of food poisoning breaks out there two days later, felling three aides de camp to the Imperial occupation.

Cassian does as his mother always told him: he keeps his eyes down and ears open. He observes and learns and never, ever volunteers anything.

He's her little minnow, fast, clever, impossible to catch. 

He finds this all rather exciting, once he starts matching up the patterns. He isn't simply _surviving_ , like a lot of the kids in the hostels and tunnels, scrambling to fill his belly and find a dry place to sleep. He's _helping_. He's continuing his mother's work.

*

He kills his first Imperial when he's eleven. He certainly doesn't mean to, but that makes no difference when the deed is done. The trooper surprises him as Cassian's about to drop down through loose grating into a feeder tunnel.

The trooper hails him and Cassian stumbles to make it look like he's tripped and needs to fix the laces on his boot. He stays crouched and raises his hands.

"I tripped," he says without looking around. He can hear only one set of boots clumping toward him. That doesn't mean anything. Troopers tend to work in pairs; the other could be hanging back. 

"On your feet," the trooper says. "Turn around slowly."

Cassian complies. They _are_ alone, which is lucky but also worrisome. With this one on his own, he might just feel like making trouble. You hear about that every so often, troopers and lower-level clerks, off the clock, bored, angry about being stuck on this shithole planet, starting shit just to have something to do.

"What're you doing tampering with Imperial facilities?"

"I tripped," Cassian repeats, even though it's obvious now that the trooper saw him move the grate.

The trooper jerks his head at the wall. "Up there, face to the wall."

"What are you doing?" He steps slowly toward the building, hoping that his sluggish pace looks like it's because he's scared, not scanning for an opening.

The trooper snorts. Through the breathing apparatus, the sound is magnified and distorted. He jabs the blaster into Cassian's shoulder. "Hurry up."

So he's worried about time, which means he's concerned about getting caught. That's good, except that as soon as he gets his hands on Cassian, he's going to feel the heavy holo-drive in his jacket's interior pocket.

"Please, sir," Cassian tries, stopping dead and spreading his arms. He tries to make his voice higher. It's already pretty high. "Don't hurt me, I don't want to get hurt. I'm just a kid."

He drops his arms to his sides and widens his eyes at the trooper. The trooper shoves the blaster against Caspian's chest, pushing him back into the wall so hard that Cassian's head bounces off the masonry. 

"Stupid Macondo vermin --" The trooper laughs and adds, in a singsong Macondian accent, "your mother's shit isn't good enough for my dick."

Cassian grabs the barrel with both hands and yanks it downward, pulling the trooper off-balance and forward. Ducking to the side, Cassian jerks the blaster out of the trooper's grip, and fires it wildly.

He hits the trooper's chest, his hand, the wall. He yanks on the switch to recharge and, backing up, gasping, fires again. The second volley finds the trooper's neck, that rubberized-collar that articulates almost like a human being's spine.

The blue flash of the blast sucks the trooper's blood of all color. It pumps and spills, white and black and shining. Cassian's blinded by it, drowning in the dazzle.

More troopers are getting closer. Cassian hears the synchronized thunder of their boots, then an alarm, the voice of a squad commander. He kicks open the grate, drops inside, and runs pell-mell into the dark.

The holo-drive is safe, though Cassian has to explain the delay to three different intermediaries before he can complete the delivery. His excuse is that he got distracted by an arcade tournament. Being a kid comes in handy with friends as well as the enemy. No adult expects very much of you. 

Afterward, he retrieves the blaster from where he hid it in a comms trench. He ventures into the warren of cantinas and stand-up drinks windows off the salvage market to see what he can get for it.

The first four traders he asks don't want anything to do with it. He tells them in his sweetest voice that his little sister found it and they just want to get rid of it before their parents catch on. They turn their backs, pretending he never spoke.

Finally, a waitress at the sleaziest establishment yet pulls him aside and tells him to deal with a trader named Bolao. Her Macondian is honey-sweet and slightly hoarse. When he asks where she's from, she looks startled.

"I'm from Labaya, querido," she says, "why?"

He's not sure, and tells her so. He must have heard the accent somewhere in the past, but it's so familiar, it's more a part of him than any memory could be. Labaya, however, is a moon three ice giants away on the other side of the system.

She fixes the collar of his jacket, her face a little sad. "Go find Bolao, tell him that Gerea said it's all right. Then you go straight home, baby, cariñito, promise me?"

Nodding, he lies as easily as he breathes. "I promise."

"That thing's taller than you are," Bolao says when Cassian finally tracks him down in a shopping complex off the port. "Fuck do you think you're doing with it?"

The blaster actually only comes up to Cassian's hip, but he forebears from pointing that out. "Trying to trade it to you."

"Smartass." Bolao turns the blaster in his big hands. He's missing a pinky finger, which some say is a mark of surviving imperial prison. Others say it's a punishment meted out by one of the Macondian mob organizations. "Just found it, huh?"

"My little sister did."

"Sure she did," Bolao says. He points the blaster at Cassian, lining him up in the sights. Cassian swallows an acrid surge of fear and fights not to flinch. "It's been fired recently, but not cleaned. Not like a white bug to neglect that."

"I don't know anything about that."

"Pinche kids," Bolao says, sighing like a grief-stricken man, then, "pinche Gerea. Fuck my life."

Cassian gets enough credits for a month->s stay at a hostel in the sylvan district (there are no trees there any longer, not since the imperials moved in, but the name persists). There, he lays low and gets bored out of his skull. He practices the language and arithmetic problems he recalls from school and tries not to sleep too deeply.

When he does, the trooper's waiting for him, screaming at Cassian through the ragged hole in his neck.

*

At thirteen, Cassian is betrayed by a young man with several names. He turns up one night in the squat that Cassian and Seechin had used for the last season and a half and stays. Taller than they, with hair the color of wet sand and eyes like rusted hulls, the new kid is fascinating in ways, for reasons, that Cassian does not have words for. He keeps to himself, doesn't ask too many questions, shares his stuff easily, so they consider him, eventually, to be trustworthy.

The name he gives Cassian was Piyon, but once or twice in the markets, he's called Tuyo or Vaz. When you look at him afterward, wondering, he shrugs the other names off, says something about staying mysterious, keeping them guessing. His clothes are Corellian but his accent from somewhere in the Outer Rim, that flat whinny of Basic that Cassian used to think was ugly. When he hears it from Piyon's lips, however, he realizes it's lovely, like the sound of breathing, like water running through dreams.

Piyon has a small library of holo-porn, a fairly steady supply of spice, and long, delicate fingers that rise quickly to cover the flash of his smile.

Sometimes Cassian looks at him for so long he doesn't know he's doing it.

Seechin just shakes their head, headtails whispering together, and elbows Cassian. "Stop gaping, bro. You're embarrassing yourself _and_ me."

Seechin is considered something of a rake among the street kids. Their species matures a bit faster than humans did, a fact that they like to remind everyone of whenever they get, or manufacture, the chance.

"Silly baby human," they tell Cassian, grabbing him by the head and wrestling him down. "Little brother."

Cassian and Seechin sleep in the same bedroll every night. They're best friends, so far as Cassian understands the concept.

"How do you guys get by?" Piyon asks one morning. The question feels natural, less like he's seeking information, more like he's just getting to know his new friends better. The three of them are tucking into stale bread and lukewarm tuber soup; it was Seechin's turn to buy breakfast, and he was both frugal and perpetually broke, so the meal was poor, even for them.

Cassian shoots Seechin a warning look. "This and that."

Piyon points his spoon at Cassian. "You always say that."

"Because it's always true." Cassian studies the slop in his cup; he'd like to tell Piyon about their activities, but, he keeps reminding himself, he doesn't know the kid, not really.

"What about you?" Seechin puts in. "Your clothes are always so nice."

Piyon shrugs just one shoulder. "This and that," he says lightly. "A little pinch here, a little bugger there."

There are lots of ways to earn credits. They might not be _easier_ , necessarily, than what Cassian does, but they're more reliable. When Cassian tries to imagine robbing people, he can only laugh, just before he hears his mother click her tongue against her teeth and sigh. _Macondians are not thieves,_ she always said, _contrary to what the Inner Core likes to say._ He'll steal food, but only when he has to, and never more than he needs at the moment. _No one should go hungry._

As for turning tricks, he can't even get through the work it takes to imagine that. He tries to, he starts to, but his thoughts stutter and halt before veering away, leaving him cold and shivery. Someone else touching him, for a prolonged period of time, doing whatever they want to his body, even for credits: he might as well join the imperials. It's the same slavery, just with different acts and token payment.

"You do that?" Cassian asks Piyon. He can't taste the food any longer. "Let them..."

"Don't mind him, he's just a baby," Seechin tells Piyon. They're wearing their headtails pulled up to the top of their skull these days. Gathered in a thick bunch, the tails look like the branches of a tree in the park, craving the morning light. "A _scared_ baby."

Cassian's face and chest flash hot at the insult. "No, I'm not! Just because I don't want to --" He stops short, mouth open, afraid to insult Piyon accidentally.

"Don't worry about it," Piyon says, holding up his hand when Seechin starts to protest. "We all do what we have to do, right? And what we _can_."

Cassian nods rapidly, grateful for whatever it is that Piyon just gave him. It's not a reprieve, not an excuse, but something else. It's a gesture, an indulgence, that Piyon didn't have to make, but did.

Cassian next makes a long trip out to one of the new suburbs. These places that house off-worlders almost exclusively make him nervous; the buildings look different, shiny metal cubes dropped down onto the familiar landscape. It's not _that_ familiar any longer, as a matter of fact; the imperial earthmovers have flattened many of the bluffs rippling up from the river.

He delivers several false identicards to a Macondian-by-marriage who works in the hospice on the edge of town, then hurries back to the city. He's detained, briefly, for no better reason than he "doesn't look like he belongs" but the security bureau releases him when his identity comes through unflagged. 

He returns to the squat to find Seechin entangled with Piyon on that same bedroll. _Their_ bedroll, that he and Seechin found and haggled for, together, in that rhythm they'd developed over the seasons. Both their shirts are off and Seechin's arousal horns erect and quivering. Cassian doesn't quite know if this is betrayal, let alone by whom. But it certainly _feels_ like it.

Cassian turns and runs.

He stays away for a ten-night, but in the end has to return. He needs his winter jacket and, he hopes, that bedroll. He has been sleeping around the tunnels again, and he'd forgotten just how cold and damp they get at the season's turn.

He times his return for midday, when Seechin is usually queuing up for the free meal served up by the red monks from Jedha.

He finds Piyon sprawled on a new bedroll, a better-quilted one in nicer colors, folding up a spice bidi. He looks up at Cassian and winks.

"I want my things back." Cassian hates how hollow, how _young_ , his voice sounds. 

Piyon gestures widely with his free hand. "Anything you want, pretty."

Cassian shakes his head, but he can't quite look away from Piyon's narrow chest, the little dollops of darker tint that form his nipples. The fuzzy shadow of hair running below his waistband.

"Where've you been?" Piyon asks as Cassian digs in the storage compartment, shaking out Seechin's smelly socks from his own winter jumper. 

"Around."

"Sneaking like a hero, huh?"

Cassian doesn't answer. He folds up his jumper, sets it on the floor beside him, and continues looking for his jacket.

"Heard you're the one to talk to, if anyone needs to get word out."

"I don't know."

"Sure you do." Piyon is suddenly very close to him, crouching beside Cassian, slipping his arm around Cassian's waist. "Way I hear it, you know just about everything worth knowing."

Cassian bites his lip. Fucking Seechin, breaking their trust. Piyon smells warm, like he's just awakened, the scent of bed and dreams still clinging to him. "That's stupid."

His face is hot, however, because that is quite the compliment. Even if Seechin shared their secrets, maybe it was worth it, if this is the result.

"You could help my friend, maybe?" Piyon asks. His breath touches the side of Cassian's neck. 

"Who, Seechin?" Cassian asks. His mouth tastes bitter.

"No," Piyon says.

"What's wrong with your friend?" He can't help his curiosity. 

"Widow, she needs to find her kids, the Empire...it took them, she says. She's desperate, to find them, to get revenge, I don't think she cares any more."

Cassian exhales through his nose. Gravity wobbles beneath his feet. He sits down heavily on his ass, knocking into Piyon. "I don't know anything about that kind of thing."

"I know," Piyon says lightly. Somehow, without looking, Cassian sees the smile on his face, quickly hidden by his fingertips. "You're just a regular kid, right?"

"Sure." Cassian turns now, pulling a knee up to his chest protectively.

"Don't know anything about trooper movements and imperial clerks, of course."

"No, nothing." Cassian meets Piyon's eyes and they regard each other. "Nothing like that."

"No, I didn't think so."

Together they weave a light, glimmering net of lies, lies they both know are lies. Teasing, flirting, stating the opposite of what they both know be true. Cassian has never done this before. He has only ever told the truth, or lied to protect the truth, or bit his lip and stayed resolutely silent. Playing with lies like this makes his head swim, his heart beat faster. 

So he is already breathless when Piyon kisses him. His hand opens and closes on Piyon's upper arm; his nails dig in.

Piyon smiles, rolling them over onto their sides. Maybe he's still lying when he murmurs, "Pretty boy" and "I've been waiting for this". Maybe he's telling the truth. For once, Cassian doesn't care. He trembles and grunts, clutching at Piyon's smooth skin. 

He has no idea what to do, despite the porn he's watched. That's different, that's old people saying gross things to each other and posing for the recorder. He's not like that, he's _hungry_ and borne aloft on need.

This is Piyon kissing him and running his hand up under Cassian's shirt. This is Cassian getting more excited, biting Piyon's throat by accident and freezing, apologies flooding his mouth, only to have Piyon's smirk curve like a blade as he says, "do that again". This is Cassian clinging - with fists, with teeth, with one leg - as Piyon jerks him off and tells him to let go, tells him to enjoy it, tells him this is only the beginning.

That much _is_ a lie. This is the end. 

The epilogue sees Cassian climbing up to the upper deck of the municipal hydroponics facility the next night. He's set to meet Piyon's friend; he's already put out a few feelers in the market and down at the harbor. He'll do what he can, he plans to tell her.

Shadowed by the looping tubes and trailing greenery, five troopers and an Imperial Security thug are waiting for him. 

*

After he recovers from the interrogations, Cassian spends the equivalent of nearly three seasons in a penal fleet-knot outside a dead ice moon where mining facilities are being built. Several old freighters and disused skiffs are strutted together with physical cable and gantries as well as data and holo links. Codenamed FR-02, the facility is better known as the Furuncle to those condemned there.

These thrown-together prisons are, he learns, common throughout the galaxy, as the crime rates grow ever higher.

Crime is any violation of the new order: political offenses like Cassian's are treated as severely as more traditional ones. Rebels are mixed in with thieves and smugglers, pacifists with rapists and murderers. 

They're all trash in the Emperor's eyes. They all live according to his benevolence. 

Cassian is little and young, _pretty_ , therefore a target. After the second night, when he manages to leave his attacker howling over a ripped testicular sac, he is left alone. All the same, he fashions a knife from some metal he peels off the rusting bulkhead and keeps it in his boot. It's not a very good knife, but it's enough.

He works in the mess, which is ruled by an asshole Trandoshan named Haq. Grease burns and knife threats are daily, hourly, occurrences, though all Cassian does is operate the creaky, wheezing dish-washing droid installations. If one is very unlucky, Haq uses his claws instead of cooking implements. 

Cassian also meets Lierb there, a stout Macondian. His accent sounds like home, even though he's from an entirely different moon.

Close enough, Cassian believes.

Lierb teaches him to cook: "you need a skill, mijo."

Cassian balls his hands into fists. "I have plenty of skills."

"You need a _legal_ skill," Lierb says, laughing, and for some reason, Cassian doesn't mind being laughed at, not by him. "This should suffice."

Haq's kitchens are not equipped for real cooking, a fact that causes Lierb an inestimable amount of grief. Cassian learns how to chop and saute, bake and roast; his fingertips grow callused from the heat until, like Lierb, he can grab a hot tray without thinking or reacting.

"This," Lierb will say, "is a mountain dish, you'll like it." Up in the mountains, they use a lot of greenery, roughly chopped, and much less sauce than on the plains. On the plains, where Cassian's mother was from, and along the coast, dishes are wetter, stews and steamed things. 

They make do, despite the constraints of Haq and the measly pantries. Lierb has an arrangement with a few prisoners in the greenhouses for the shed leaves of a vine that tastes almost like the lorocco back home. With Cassian's help, he negotiates another deal with the master of the cavid nursery for meat in exchange for fermented syrups. 

On one of his exploratory trips through the ventilation tunnels, Cassian comes across a refuse heap. Some security clerk's office was trashed and dumped here, probably as a disciplinary measure. He pockets the loose wires and shards of pottery, figuring they'll prove valuable at some point. The greater treasure is the remnants of a spiky-leaved plant that looks like a maguey from home. When they flower, towards the end of their lives, maguey smell sweeter than first love, headier than desire, or so the song goes. Wherever Macondians settle, they bring maguey, for the scent, the sap, the leaves.

This poor thing was just decoration for some asshole's office, easily crushed and forgotten. The injustice of that is minor compared to other things he has seen, yet Cassian kicks at the trash, has to stop himself from shrieking curses in protest.

Lierb presses his fist to his mouth when Cassian brings him one leaf.

"It is maguey, isn't it?"

Unable to speak, Lierb nods, his eyes crinkled up, lashes spangled with tears.

He shows Cassian how to scrape off the thorns, then work the leaf back and forth in your hands until it's as pliable as rubber. They set aside the scooped-out meat of the leaf to add to porridge in the morning. Back in the cells, they line a shallow dish - once a bedpan from the clinic, Cassian thinks - with several overlapping leaves, then ladle in bits and ends of meat and chunks of synth-protein before folding the leaves over the top. They cook the dish behind the heater all day. Prisoners wander by, lured by the scent.

"Just be glad you didn't find a potted platano," Lierb tells Cassian, laughing, as they dig into their third helping. "Those beautiful fools on Labaya put it in everything. We'd be eating fruit til the ends of the galaxy."

* 

Cassian plants the broken, then sloppily grafted-together, maguey stalk in another of the tunnels. He trades for manure from the nurseries, dirt from the greenhouses, and tends the plant. He visits whenever he can. He collects the seeds, turning most of them over to Lierb to roast and grind for seasoning, but keeping back enough to grow a few more plants.

He gets caught when he breaks into the infirmary complex in search of brighter bulbs. His plants are tiny, struggling things, not the rugged, thick-stalked champions they ought to be. Their leaves droop, their sap tastes metallic rather than sweet. When they do produce new seeds, they are misshapen and refuse to sprout.

The lumo-therapy machines in the infirmary are rarely used, if ever. The doctors and med-droids are far more inclined to slap a bacta strip on any and all complaints and send you away to recover or die. It's none of their concern either way.

The drugs cases are well-patrolled, however, and Cassian is operating on outdated information when he drops down from the O2 shaft into the supply closet.

The security droid that drags him to the guard station starts to malfunction just outside the infirmary. It's speaking backwards, misjudging turns and moving too quickly for him to keep up. 

Cassian had heard something about an escape attempt; some rebels wanted to reprogram the security infrastructure in order to take control of one of the outer ships of the Furuncle. They thought they could attempt a hyperspace jump to freedom.

Early on, Cassian traded some hand-drawn maps of the various shafts and ventilation ducts to the rebels. It's not information he shares with just anyone, but there were a few Macondians among the planners, and he had to respect any attempt to resist, however preposterous. As their plans grew more grandiose, he'd backed off. He wanted off here as much as anyone, but there was a difference between wanting and doing. Those fools were going to fail and probably take a lot of others with them.

"Prisoner up hurry," the droid says. Its eye lights are blinking out of synch.

"Your language port is clogged," Cassian tells it. It's worth a try.

The droid spins and backhands the bulkhead.

"So are your rotors," Cassian adds. "We should get you to reprogramming."

"Quiet be you! Silence!"

"I'm not a prisoner," Cassian says in Macondian.

The droid's eyes dim, flicker, then redouble in luminosity. Something whirrs, deep in its torso.

Cassian adds, more quickly, "I'm in charge. Follow me."

He thinks he can ditch the droid where the causeway widens between ships; security is to the left, while a narrower gantry crooks right. It's so disoriented that if he times it right, he can probably break right and run out of reach.

Cassian does it, but the droid chases him, thundering in Binary now.

Cassian keeps running, deeper into a twisting system of corridors he isn't familiar with. When the lights go dim, then turn off, and the whole place starts to shudder, he doubles back. He drives forward, leading with his shoulder and knocking the droid off its servos. Tackling it, he kneels on its torso to twist off its head.

Wires spill from its neck as red emergency lights throb overhead. They, too wink out. Cassian was still unconscious when he arrived here, so this is the first time he'll remember making a hyperspace jump. He wraps his arms around the droid's neck. Its head bounces away into the dark. He vomits a few times, before the jump is over.

They find him sprawled over the decapitated droid, puke down the front of his shirt.

"Welcome to the rebellion," someone says, "little stowaway."

Cassian has his knife in his hand and the droid's neural wires in his other fist. He looks around wildly.

"I'm not that little," he says in Macondian, then all but growls when they laugh at him. 

His plants are going to die back there in the dark.


End file.
